Monday, August 17, 2020

Trump sabotages the Postal Service to rig the election

I wonder how much more obvious things will have to get before mainstream sources start calling this a coup?


Just a year ago, Trump retweeted someone who suggested he was "owed" an extra two years of the presidency. The "reasoning" behind this? In the parallel universe of alternative facts, Trump and his supporters tried to claim the Mueller investigation was a coup attempt, and that somehow justified Trump performing his own coup to seize power for an extra few years.

That is quite deranged, but extremely serious once we consider his Tweets are official communication from the President. At the time, and at a few other points during Trump's presidency, politicians and the media were willing to throw out the grave term "Constitutional Crisis" to describe the administration's disregard for laws and the uncertainty that legal processes would continue to be followed. At some point (certainly by the point of the Senate's openly corrupt handling of the impeachment trial), we passed from mere Constitutional Crisis to the point where our government and system of laws failed and were successfully subverted--a coup.

Now that the election is nearing and it seems that Trump and the Republican party are likely to lose the election, they are openly engaging in the same kind of corrupt voter suppression and manipulation tactics as despots like Putin.

***

Despite winning the 2016 election, Trump constantly declared there were "millions" of fraudulent votes for his opponent. By keeping his supporters paranoid and distrusting of society at large, he has easily been able to turn his attention to attempting to delegitimize the 2020 election process as well.

As early as March 2020, with the first wave of the pandemic in full swing, Trump began to demonize mail-in voting. He even told us his motive: he believed it would benefit the Democratic party.

In an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Trump referenced proposals from Democrats in the coronavirus stimulus negotiations that would have vastly increased funding for absentee and vote-by-mail options. The final package included $400 million for the effort, which was far less than what Democrats had sought.

“The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/30/trump-voting-republicans/


At a White House briefing on July 30th 2020, Trump suggested mail-in voting would potentially take years to count to determine the winner.

Earlier that morning he Tweeted about considering to delay the election, saying mail-in voting would be both inaccurate and fraudulent.

On August 15, Trump repeated the claim that it could take years and added one critical piece of information. Ballots won't be counted because they're going to get "lost"...

"You know what? You're not going to know this — possibly, if you really did it right — for months or for years. Because these ballots are all going to be lost, they’re all going to be gone," Trump said.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-election-result-take-years-as-usps-attack-fears-grow-2020-8?op=1


Saying that counting so many mail-in votes would be slow, in itself, might not be nefarious if it were not for the fact that on August 12 and 13 Trump had said he is intentionally trying to defund the Postal Service in order to prevent votes from being counted.

“They need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said on Fox Business Thursday morning of the states that are implementing universal mail-in voting ahead of the November election. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.

They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in voting,” Trump said of the Post Office, which is requesting billions in emergency funding. “So, therefore, they can’t do it, I guess. Are they going to do it even if they don’t have the money?

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7jkxq/trump-just-admitted-hes-sabotaging-the-usps-to-screw-up-the-election

***

If all of this is not damning enough, under the direction of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, post offices across the country are having mail sorting equipment removed in an attempt to delay the mail and manifest Trump's wishes for mail-in votes to be impossible to effectively count. Documents show that at least 671 mail sorting machines are scheduled for removal across the nation this year. The removal process began as recently as June.

On August 7 DeJoy began a massive restructuring of the leadership of the Postal Service. Representative Gerry Connolly, who leads the Congressional committee which oversees the Postal Service, called this restructuring "deliberate sabotage to disrupt mail service on the eve of the election — an election that hinges on mail-in ballots." Even Obama has declared Trump is attempting to suppress votes. A former president accusing the current administration of actively suppressing votes is not something to be taken lightly.

Several Democrats accused the Trump administration of trying to sabotage the country’s mail system after a broad restructuring of the United States Postal Service that some have characterized as a “Friday Night Massacre.” Postmaster General Louis DeJoy moved forward with a significant reorganization of the Postal Service leadership along with a hiring freeze for leadership positions. The reorganization involves the reassignment or displacement of 23 USPS executives, including some who had been at the Postal Service for decades. Among the targets of the reorganization were the two top executives who oversee daily operations at the Postal Service.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/democrats-sabotage-usps-friday-night-massacre-postal-service.html



In recent days, many on social media have become increasingly alarmed at the number of mail collection boxes being removed from the streets in a number of states. It is allegedly routine for the Postal Service to remove and redistribute these mailboxes due to maintenance or declining mail volume, but with everything else going on it is incredibly suspicious. Congressman Jim Cooper, among others, does not believe the explanation that it is "routine". A Postal Service spokesman says they will stop removing them until after the election.

***

Intentionally sabotaging and slowing mail delivery is, of course, illegal.

18 U.S. Code § 1703. Delay or destruction of mail or newspapers:

(a) Whoever, being a Postal Service officer or employee, unlawfully secretes, destroys, detains, delays, or opens any letter, postal card, package, bag, or mail entrusted to him or which shall come into his possession, and which was intended to be conveyed by mail, or carried or delivered by any carrier or other employee of the Postal Service, or forwarded through or delivered from any post office or station thereof established by authority of the Postmaster General or the Postal Service, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1703

Trump attempted to plant the idea in our minds that it is somehow normal for mail-in votes to be delayed for 'months or even years'. On the eve of an election, in the middle of a pandemic where many will choose to utilize mail services instead of voting in person, the Postmaster General has decided to drastically reduce the ability of the Postal Service to process mail. Trump has admitted multiple times that his goal is to sabotage the Postal Service to prevent mail-in voting from being feasible, and that his motive is the belief that mail-in voting will benefit the Democratic party.

To spell it out, this is a pretty clear-cut case of corruption.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. (And, yes, he actually looks that smug in all his photos).

***

Why was DeJoy chosen as Postmaster General? Well, he was a top Trump donor and was in charge of fundraising for the 2020 Republican National Convention. Beyond this, he and his wife hold anywhere between $30 to $75 million in assets of US Postal Service competitors. Such corruption and conflict of interest is not surprising in the current Republican administration.

"The idea that you can be a postmaster general and hold tens of millions in stocks in a postal service contractor is pretty shocking," said Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, who resigned in 2017. "It could be that he's planning on selling it, but I don't understand the delay. He has managed to divest a lot of other things. And if he wasn't prepared to sell that off, he shouldn't have taken the job."

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/12/politics/postal-service-dejoy-conflicts-amazon-trades-xpo-stake/index.html

***

Trump's attempts to sabotage the Postal Service in order to suppress mail-in voting are, once again, more evidence that his party is engaging in a coup. Trump and other Republicans have frequently said that their motive is the belief higher voter turnout will favor the Democrat party.

Ever since it dawned on Trump that mail-in votes would likely increase voter participation, and thus diminish his chances of re-election, he has been doing all he can to cast mail-in voting in a negative light--despite the fact that he himself utilizes it and also committed voter fraud while doing so!


With all the above information taken into consideration, it is crystal clear what Trump means by "doing it right" and "losing the ballots".

"You know what? You're not going to know this — possibly, if you really did it right — for months or for years. Because these ballots are all going to be lost, they’re all going to be gone," Trump said.

Democrats are at least taking this seriously enough to recall the House of Representatives back from August recess, in order to vote on legislation to restore Postal Service operations. Although any legislation will almost certainly not pass the Republican-controlled Senate (which has previously blocked 10 bills designed to defend against interference in the election, among other critical things.)

The House Oversight Committee will hold an emergency meeting on August 24 and DeJoy has agreed to voluntarily testify. At the time of writing this article, it does not appear the House has issued a subpoena to legally compel him to testify. (DeJoy declined a previous invitation to appear on August 7, the same day he began what some are calling a "Friday Night Massacre" of the Postal Service leadership).

Representative Jim Cooper urged DeJoy be subpoenaed and arrested if he refuse to answer to the subpoena. Congress does have the power to arrest those who defy a Congressional subpoena, and they should have used it on other Trump lackeys, but Congressional leadership has too often chosen to let them wreak havoc with minimal consequences.

***
***

Back before impeachment began, Nancy Pelosi gave the warning that she believed it was possible Trump wouldn't accept the results of the election and leave at the end of his term. This was extremely shocking, since at the time we were busy criticizing Pelosi for her overly-cautious and sluggish pace for pursuing impeachment. She was not one to say sensationalized things to get media headlines, so for her to say something so provocative meant she and other senior political leaders held grave concerns for the future of our government.

Trump has already spent years inviting foreign interference in the 2020 election and recently said "I don't care" if Russia interferes with the elections again... Trump is even planning to have a meeting with Putin before the election!!!

Foreign enemies meddling in our election is one thing, but now Trump is openly admitting to sabotaging it himself... How much further will we sink before we are honest with ourselves and admit this is not just an aberration but a full-on coup and subversion of our government which has been happening in broad daylight for half a decade?


Surely I'm not the only one to recognize the gravity of what's going on here. We're like the frog being gradually boiled alive. We've been gaslighted for so long that few people are willing to push back on the narrative that Trump and his supporters have spun over the past 4 years, and the Overton Window has moved so far into insanity that many are simply incapable of seeing the freefall we are in. 50 years from now, it will be obvious in the history books, but the damage is being done to us now.

Sunday, August 2, 2020

Worse than we thought: Trump administration's handling of Coronavirus pandemic is not mere negligence, but intentional bioterrorism

In my last post, I touched a bit on the utter insanity and corruption of the Trump administration's response to COVID-19. This included the government seizing masks and supplies from states and even other nations which had purchased US-made products, contracts for supplies going to Trump cronies who lacked the ability to deliver on the supplies they were supposed to produce, and Trump's constant insistence that the virus would magically go away if we pretended it didn't exist.

Just when we thought things couldn't get any more insane, a report from Vanity Fair has revealed a coordinated nation-wide federal response to COVID-19 was scrapped because Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner realized the virus was primarily impacting "blue states" and urban areas. The "logic" behind this strategy was that by forcing each state to handle the virus on their own with minimal federal support, it would be easier for propagandists to blame the state governors and deflect from Trump's responsibility for the abysmal handling of the virus, in addition to the chaos taking more American lives.

So, Trump's response is not mere incompetence or negligence, but intentional malice. The administration is intentionally letting a biological agent spread throughout our nation and kill Americans because it benefits them politically. This is bioterrorism.

That's not sensationalism; that's simply telling it like it is. This has become the new normal. And every time we shy away from calling it what it is--bioterrorism--we help normalize and accept it.

***

"Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal.

...

Inside the White House, over much of March and early April, Kushner’s handpicked group of young business associates, which included a former college roommate, teamed up with several top experts from the diagnostic-testing industry. Together, they hammered out the outline of a national testing strategy. The group—working night and day, using the encrypted platform WhatsApp—emerged with a detailed plan obtained by Vanity Fair.

Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.

...

The plan crafted at the White House, then, set out to connect the dots. Some of those who worked on the plan were told that it would be presented to President Trump and likely announced in the Rose Garden in early April. “I was beyond optimistic,” said one participant. “My understanding was that the final document would make its way to the president over that weekend” and would result in a “significant announcement.”

But no nationally coordinated testing strategy was ever announced. The plan, according to the participant, “just went poof into thin air.”"

[...]

"Countries that have successfully contained their outbreaks have empowered scientists to lead the response. But when Jared Kushner set out in March to solve the diagnostic-testing crisis, his efforts began not with public health experts but with bankers and billionaires. They saw themselves as the “A-team of people who get shit done,” as one participant proclaimed in a March Politico article.

...

The group’s collective lack of relevant experience was far from the only challenge it faced.

...

According to one participant, the group did not coordinate its work with a diagnostic-testing team at Health and Human Services, working under Admiral Brett Giroir, who was appointed as the nation’s “testing czar” on March 12. Kushner’s group was “in their own bubble,” said the participant. “Other agencies were in their own bubbles. The circles never overlapped.”"

As described in the paragraphs above, Kushner's team was far from ideal, but the administration at least was not completely abdicating its duty to manage this crisis.

"As it evolved, Kushner’s group called on the help of several top diagnostic-testing experts. Together, they worked around the clock, and through a forest of WhatsApp messages. The effort of the White House team was “apolitical,” said the participant, and undertaken “with the nation’s best interests in mind.”

Kushner’s team hammered out a detailed plan, which Vanity Fair obtained. It stated, “Current challenges that need to be resolved include uneven testing capacity and supplies throughout the US, both between and within regions, significant delays in reporting results (4-11 days), and national supply chain constraints, such as PPE, swabs, and certain testing reagents.”

The plan called for the federal government to coordinate distribution of test kits, so they could be surged to heavily affected areas, and oversee a national contact-tracing infrastructure. It also proposed lifting contract restrictions on where doctors and hospitals send tests, allowing any laboratory with capacity to test any sample. It proposed a massive scale-up of antibody testing to facilitate a return to work. It called for mandating that all COVID-19 test results from any kind of testing, taken anywhere, be reported to a national repository as well as to state and local health departments.

And it proposed establishing “a national Sentinel Surveillance System” with “real-time intelligence capabilities to understand leading indicators where hot spots are arising and where the risks are high vs. where people can get back to work.”

By early April, some who worked on the plan were given the strong impression that it would soon be shared with President Trump and announced by the White House. The plan, though imperfect, was a starting point. Simply working together as a nation on it “would have put us in a fundamentally different place,” said the participant."

Then, at some point, it all started falling apart...

"But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.

Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said."

...

"On April 27, Trump stepped to a podium in the Rose Garden, flanked by members of his coronavirus task force and leaders of America’s big commercial testing laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, and finally announced a testing plan: It bore almost no resemblance to the one that had been forged in late March, and shifted the problem of diagnostic testing almost entirely to individual states."

***

This report on Kushner's attitudes goes hand-in-hand with a report from a few days ago revealing Trump held identical sentiments. Trump only recently started taking the pandemic more seriously once officials told him "his people" in "red" states were beginning to be seriously impacted by the virus.

Trump at a White House briefing on the coronavirus on July 23. All it took was a nice color-coded map to show him "his people" were dying.

"People close to Trump, many speaking on the condition of anonymity to share candid discussions and impressions, say the president’s inability to wholly address the crisis is due to his almost pathological unwillingness to admit error; a positive feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News; and a penchant for magical thinking that prevented him from fully engaging with the pandemic.

In recent weeks, with more than 145,000 Americans now dead from the virus, the White House has attempted to overhaul — or at least rejigger — its approach. The administration has revived news briefings led by Trump and presented the president with projections showing how the virus is now decimating Republican states full of his voters. Officials have also set up a separate, smaller coronavirus working group led by Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, along with Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner."

[...]

"“The irony is that if he’d just performed with minimal competence and just mouthed words about national unity, he actually could be in a pretty strong position right now, where the economy is reopening, where jobs are coming back,” said Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to former president Barack Obama. “And he just could not do it.”"

[...]

"In the past couple of weeks, senior advisers began presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases among “our people” in Republican states, a senior administration official said. They also shared projections predicting that virus surges could soon hit politically important states in the Midwest — including Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, the official said.

This new approach seemed to resonate, as he hewed closely to pre-scripted remarks in a trio of coronavirus briefings last week.

“This could have been stopped. It could have been stopped quickly and easily. But for some reason, it wasn’t, and we’ll figure out what that reason was,” Trump said Thursday, seeming to simultaneously acknowledge his predicament while trying to assign blame elsewhere."

[...]

"In mid-March, as many of the nation’s businesses were shuttering early in the pandemic, Trump proclaimed in the Rose Garden, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” Those six words have neatly summed up Trump’s approach not only to the pandemic, but also to many of the other crises he has faced during his presidency."



"In light of both the worsening state of the outbreak and its implications for his political fortunes, Trump has taken some measures to admit that the virus is a serious problem. He has resumed regular briefings at the White House, where he acknowledged last week that the pandemic will get worse before it improves, and on July 11, he wore a mask in public for the first time, three months after the Centers for Disease Control began recommending face coverings."

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-shifted-coronavirus-strategy-from-deaths-spiking-in-red-states-2020-7

***

I do not say this lightly. Those who aid and abet the Trump administration (such as by refusing to impeach and remove him) are not only participating in a coup, but now engaging in the killing of political opponents via bioterrorism. (Oh, and in case you missed it, Trump has recently said he is considering postponing the election--paving the way for a full-on totalitarian coup).

This is the reality we live in. This is how far we've fallen.

If we don't set up a series of Tribunals to uncover and punish every single one of these egregious crimes once Trump is out of office, it will mean everything he and his administration has done will become normal. It will mean the next administration is accepting and endorsing all the crimes that have happened, because ignoring things of this magnitude means they will be actively continuing to cover them up.